fsol said:
It reminds me of Derren Brown knocking the wind out of a martial artist without touching him on one of his shows. First of all he did it in front of him, and then he did it behind him so the martial artist wouldn't pick up visual clues. The result both times? The martial artist appeared winded. No magic powers involved.
This makes me think of Bruce Lee.
(Bare with me, there is a tenuous connection to YB somewhere in here!)
On a recent documentary they described how he upset the established Chinese kung fu world when he started to disregard a lot of the old pointless, fanciful and sometimes plain silly and ineffective kung fu techniques by beginning to form his own more pragmatic martial arts system, which eventually became Jeet Kune Do. Angered at this disregard, the Hong Kong kung fu establishment made a deal with him:
"If you can beat our best traditional kung fu man in a fair fight." they told him, "You can teach your martial arts however you want". So their best man fly's out to the USA, where Bruce promptly *kicks* the guys butt. I mention this to re-enforce how good of a martial artist he was, and not just a movie star.
Bruce jogged and trained almost every day of this adult life, he looked after his diet, and physically he represented the pinnacle of what can be achieved by martial arts.
But that really is just half of the story. The guy was also an intellectual. Lecturing in Philosophy at university, he was extremely well read. He had an extensive library on various subjects, and he had read and re-read, took on board or dismissed as irrelevant virtually every oriental martial arts and philosophy book he could lay his hands on.
So now I'm getting to my point but before I do, I need to mention that you can not dismiss Bruce Lee as being a 'westerner' and therefore unable to comprehend the eastern mind-set needed for belief in action at a distance such as the YB claims: as his roots and thoughts lay firmly in the orient. I say this because from what I've read on the YB threads, this criticism is pointed at us skeptics: "We are westerners therefore can't ever understand the YB claims & beliefs". Bruce ate, drank and breathed all martial arts practice, history and eastern philosophy, so that argument can't apply to him.
So here's my point: When Bruce was show casing his supreme martial arts skills on 70’s TV shows i.e. knocking over grown men with a 1 inch punches, kicking in two a 1 inch thick freely dangling plank of wood, etc etc, were there any references or claims about being able to do this without making contact with the subject? Of course not.
Oops.
Even with decades of training and research he some how missed the amazing fact that you could go to a few YB Full Moon ceremonies and suddenly be able to injure people without even making contact with them? Not likely, the *truth* is that the greatest martial artist ever (IMO) knew the limitations of martial arts, the world we live in and the limits of human abilities just as well as we skeptics do. And he accepted these limitations.
The YB claims can not work. Demonstrations and examination of the ability for the human mind to effect physical bodies at a distance by thoughts alone have always failed during objective testing, and it'll take a lot more than these silly claims for the rational world to forget this.
These powers do not exist apart from on movie screens, video games and the pages of comic books and that is where they rightly belong.
While big kudos obviously goes to any martial art claiming things like this, and no doubt it will get them a lot of new-age subscribers, aswell as subscriptions from gullible martial artists desperate to get 'one up' on their opponants. These claims are pure fantasy and I can't wait to see them shown for what they really are.
Oh if things were different: I can think of nothing more in the world that I'd rather watch than Bruce Lee facing off to a YB master. If I owned $1million myself I'd bet that no spooky action at a distance showed up in that very quick and decisive fight.
Neil
. To show how loosely the word "wand" could be interpreted consider that 2nd defintion at dictionary.com for "wand" says "scepter", the first definition for "scepter" says "staff". I think what Joko used could be fairly called a staff . . . 
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